


The Survivors

by 100demons



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Gen, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 23:05:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4038007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100demons/pseuds/100demons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three days after Sai returns home from the war, the message comes winging through the wind, borne by the plain black messenger crows used by the Administration offices. </p><p>Team Yamato is officially disbanded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Survivors

Three days after Sai returns home from the war, the message comes winging through the wind, borne by the plain black messenger crows used by the Administration offices.

Team Yamato is officially disbanded.

 

* * *

 

The Captain lives in the outskirts of the village, tucked away in a corner between a grassy park and the curve of the outer wall; it’s a good hour’s walk from the center of the village, and Sai takes it slowly, marking new buildings and roads sprouting up amidst the ruins of the Pein’s attempted invasion.

The rusty brown gate squeaks a little as he opens it; on the very edge of his perception he senses the faint visceral twang of chakra strings as he pushes past and onto the small dirt path leading up to the door. It’s a plain brick house, and Sai notes how little wood there is-- the shutters perhaps, the door, the faded yellow flower boxes hanging off the windowsills, paint peeling off at the corners. Red poppies sway gently in time with the wind, full blossoms unfolding to meet the first rays of spring sunshine.

The door swings open by the time he reaches the steps.

Captain Yamato is not behind it.

“Guess I owe him a beer,” the woman says, shoving at the purple fringe of hair in her eyes, dark with sweat. She’s not much taller than him, solidly built with broad shoulders and taped wrists, her tightly leashed presence marking her as a high level ninja. There’s a sharp edge to her smile as she looks down at him, the tip of her tongue flicking out to wet her bottom lip. “You must be one of his wayward hatchlings.”

Sai stretches his senses out, feeling the edges of her chakra signature. It burns in a way that he can’t describe, the sensation not quite physical. Like the touch of fevered skin; the pain of looking at the sun straight on, leaving hazy blue streaks across his vision; the sound a match makes when striking flame: all of these combined only beginning to approximate the scrape of her chakra against his.

He very carefully doesn’t reach for the ink brush hidden up his sleeve. “This is the residence of Captain Yamato, jounin of Konoha?”

The woman laughs, throwing her head back, exposing the tanned brown skin of her neck. Sai jerks his own chin down a fraction, feeling oddly vulnerable.

“Seriously? _Yamato?_ I knew his codename was gonna be something stupid.” She gives him a knowing look and scrapes her fingernails through her hair again. It’s buzzed short on the sides, the top grown out long enough to graze the tip of her ears. “Come on in,” she says, pulling the door open all the way. “He’s hanging out in the back.”

She turns and fades away down the hallway, moving with an easy, lithe grace. Sai trails behind at a steady three paces and keeps a hand on the small emergency scroll on his hip.

The walls are sparsely decorated, wallpapered over in abstract geometric patterns; here and there, Sai catches a faint glimpse of what might be a photo, but he’s too distant to tell. By the back door leading out to the garden, there’s a small scroll hanging, traditional characters slashing boldly across the creamy rice paper. He lingers a moment to study the aggressive brush strokes.

“You’re the one who did the flying ink drawings, right?”

The woman is standing just a touch too close, her crossed arms almost grazing the back of his dark chuunin blues. He restrains a twitch and smoothly turns around, moving away to create more space.

The smile on her face widens, cat-like.

“Saw them during the war,” she says. “Pretty neat way of making dispatches send themselves.”

Sai sent out hundreds, thousands of birds, black wings aloft on the strokes of hurried messages. _Losing ground; fifteen hundred casualties; requesting reinforcements; hold and do not retreat, all troops to advance at dawn; the war is over, stand down, all troops stand down. The war is over_. His hands are now permanently stained with chakra ink, seeped into the bed of his nails, the whorls of his fingerprints, the crease of his palms.

“I’m here to see Captain Yamato,” he says solidly.

Her eyes flicker down at his hands and Sai realizes too late that they’re curled into white-knuckled fists. He uncurls them with a deliberate slowness, wiping the sweat on his trousers.

“Sure,” she says, only a trace of her former humor now coloring her voice. “Right through the back door, you can’t miss him.”

He gives her a nod and sweeps past her. The metal handle of the door feels cold and slick against his palm as he pulls it open, feeling the subtle vibration of another chakra string as he crosses the threshold.

The yard behind the home is nearly the size of the small park it borders, ringed by a row of neatly trimmed trees. The grass is a lush green carpet, overgrown and half obscuring the legs of the metal white garden table sitting in the shaded overhang by the wall of the house. Sai steps out into the sunlight, the soft grass releasing a sweet perfume with every footfall. A bumblebee trundles lazily past his ear and swoops for the bed of flowers on the far side of the yard, just beginning to bloom with the soft pastels of spring flowers.

The woman is right. He cannot miss Captain Yamato.

The Captain is sitting in a cushioned wheelchair by the garden table, bright red and pink blankets piled up on his lap. His dark head is slumped to the side, leaning on a fluffy white pillow that has a cheerful pattern of smiling dango and bubbles inscribed with the words “I’m tasty!”

He is not wearing his standard uniform or his forehead protector.

Sai makes it halfway to the table before the Captain wakes up, his hazy dark eyes taking a few seconds to focus on Sai’s face, enough time for Sai to palm a knife and throw it in the brief unguarded moment. He does not, but the stretch of the Captain’s pale visible throat lurks at the corner of his eyes.

“Oh,” Captain Yamato says, his words slurred with sleep. “Hey.” He rubs his eyes and shifts into a more comfortable seat in the chair, yawning widely. “This is a surprise, what brings you by?”

Sai shrugs. He picked it up during his time on Team Yamato, from watching Naruto and Sakura, and he’s found it to be an effective form of conveying ambiguity. “How are your injuries?”

Captain Yamato makes a face and directs him over to the chair next to him. “Sit, so I don’t have to crane my neck up to look at your face. I’m doing as well as can be expected I suppose,” he says, his mouth curving up into something not quite a smile.

Sai moves the chair so that it’s set against the back of the brick wall of the house, with a clear sightlines over the entire yard before he settles into the seat. Captain Yamato watches this with an odd look on his face that Sai identifies as amusement after some consideration.

“I received word that you were medically discharged from the service,” Sai says, folding his hands into his lap.

“Did you?” Captain Yamato says, a neutral expression settling on his face. “Not untrue, though I’d like to know where you heard it from.”

Sai slides a piece of rice paper from his pocket and silently hands it over to him.

The Captain’s heavy brow draws together as he slowly unfolds the paper with trembling hands. “I see,” he says finally. “I didn’t even realize that we were still officially on record as a team. It’s been so long, since before the war…” His voice trails off as his gaze drifts over to the garden, his eyes briefly unfocusing.

Sai does not know how to reconcile this tired sick man with the Captain he served with before the war, who drew wood up from nothing with a twitch of his finger, who wore the bone and black of ANBU and bore its spiral mark of duty on his shoulder, who held down the fox demon through sheer will and determination, who clapped Sai on the shoulder and said _I trust you’ll have the first watch for tonight_ and went to sleep with Naruto and Sakura flanking his sides, trusting him to guard their backs.

Captain Yamato sighs and folds the paper along the old creased lines. “I suppose you want to know why.”

“I want…” He hesitates, his tongue sliding over the cracks of his teeth, the words uncertain and alien on his tongue. Sai shrugs again. “I want to know if you are okay.”

The Captain’s eyes widen a fraction. “I’ll have to mark this down on a calendar to commemorate this landmark event. You’re showing concern for me?”

Sai scowls, knowing very well this to be another way of the Captain to poke fun at him. “Sakura is better at that than you are.”

Captain Yamato chuckles. “She was always the brightest out of three of you, though there wasn’t much of a competition anyway.” He hands the paper back to Sai, their fingertips brushing.

His chakra feels _coiled_ for lack of a better word, vines overgrown in a tight tangle, choking life and light away, reeking of dust and decay and of old dead things rotting away in the darkness. Sai flinches violently, jerking his hand back away and tearing the paper in half.

“Well,” the Captain says quietly, the laughter fading away from his eyes. “There’s your answer.”

Sai looks down at Captain Yamato’s brown calloused hand, at the plain normal skin hiding the putrid chakra within. It feels nothing like the Captain’s old chakra signature, of freshly crushed pine needles and dappled forest sunlight, of the deep silences between the vast trees of the Shodai’s forest, vast and heavy and a touch mysterious. The Captain’s chakra now is a perversion of what it used to be, all twisted up into a darkened mess, lifeless.

“What happened?” he asks, tasting bile.

Captain Yamato’s mouth twists sharply, bitter and edged like a bloody blade. “What else but Orochimaru?” His hands curl and uncurl helplessly in his lap. “Or Kabuto in this case, but for all intents and purposes, they were one and the same. He even implanted the old bastard’s DNA in himself.” The pain lines around his mouth deepen.

“The medics aren’t sure what exactly happened, but they think that when my chakra was used to fuel the undead army, it was too much of a strain on my coils and they collapsed.”

“But you’re alive.” Sai looks at the Captain’s wheelchair, PROPERTY OF KONOHA GENERAL stencilled in white paint across the sides.

“I owe my life to Kakashi-senpai and Sakura, who were clever enough to draw emergency seals to stabilize my chakra coils the minute I was extracted from the device.” Captain Yamato points at his abdomen, hovering over the main chakra point.

“I have something like six hundred different seals on me right now keeping me alive, and I’m due to get another six hundred my next surgery. It’s why I’m in this wheelchair, because all these arrays are powered on what little energy I have left and that means I can barely walk, let alone run around and fight things.”

Sai lifts his right hand, wrapped up in a precautionary brace to protect still healing bone. “This puts my broken wrist into perspective,” he observes.

The Captain grins blackly. “It’s not all so bad, considering how fucked up I was when they first pulled me out of the wreckage. I’m alive, for one. Sakura told me my heart stopped just about six times while they were transporting me over to Konoha General. Another couple of surgeries and they think I’ll be well enough to go without a mobility aid.”

“But not as a ninja.”

Captain Yamato shakes his head. “No, not as a ninja,” he says, looking away.

“Oh. But then what will you _do_?” Sai wonders, still grappling with the image of the Captain sitting in a wheelchair, his worn face no longer bearing the spiral mark of the village.

Captain Yamato gives him a look Sai has seen before, usually directed towards Naruto right after something very large has exploded. “Just fall over and die of despair, I suppose.”

Sai thinks this is a poor attempt at a humorous remark. “That wasn’t very funny.”

“No?” Captain Yamato says, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. “Sometimes I think that my whole life is just one very long joke. I suppose it takes a special sense of humor to laugh at it.” He shakes his head, dark strands of hair falling over his forehead. Without the forehead protector to hold it back, it reaches all the way to his brow, feathering down to the curve of his jaw, shadowed with stubble.

“What do _you_ think I’ll do?” he asks, thoughtful.

Sai leans back in his chair, feeling the emergency scroll underneath his tunic dig into the small of his back. “I don’t know. I don’t know what retired ninja do.” He thinks back to a few of the shopkeepers he met after joining Team Yamato, missing fingers and scarred faces slowly piecing together into something clearer. Perhaps retirement means living with and as civilians, serving the village in a non combatant position.

The Captain gives him a considering look. “What happened if a ninja was no longer capable of serving in ROOT?”

This time it is Sai’s turn to look away. He finds that he cannot quite meet the Captain’s eyes, something dark and heavy curling up at the bottom of his chest. If this is what emotions are like, Sai almost prefers not having them at all. “Useless tools were always discarded,” he says dispassionately, forcing away the sick feeling. “After all, what is the point of keeping a blade that has lost its edge?”

“None at all,” Captain Yamato says in a low voice. “If you value a human life and an object the same.”

The scroll bites deeper into the tender skin of his back. “Danzou-sama is dead and ROOT is no more. This conversation is no longer relevant.”

“It remains relevant so long as you still live, bearing his mark,” the Captain says and though his voice is soft, his words pierce Sai with unerring accuracy.

Sai swallows, and for a moment his tongue burns with the phantom pain of the long faded silencing seal. He squeezes his hands tight, to stop them from trembling.

“Listen Sai, I understand--”

The back door creaks open, the sound like the crack of blade on bone and Sai instinctively snaps a scroll open with his left hand, the long end still fluttering in the wind as he palms a brush, ink whipping onto the paper and then roaring to life with a burst of chakra sparks. A tiger leaps into the air, fangs dripping, tail lashing wildly in the air.

For a frantic moment, Sai feels the familiar gut-wrenching trench panic claw at his stomach and he automatically ducks down into a defensive crouch, pulling a blade out his ankle sheath, cover, he needs to find _cover_ \--

“Stand down soldier,” Captain Yamato snaps.

Sai freezes.

A chakra signature flares just before his construct explodes into a shower of black drops, crackling with built up energy. A snake rears up on its massive tail from the ground, plumes of displaced astral smoke still curling around the coils of its sinuous body. It shakes its head in distaste, splattering drops of ink everywhere.

“Tastes funny,” it hisses, massive slit-pupiled yellow eyes swinging over to inspect the black puddles pooling on the grass. “What is it?”

“Hopefully not lethal,” the woman says, her eyebrow arched nearly into her hairline. It looks like a face Sakura would make at Naruto. “Hey kid, is this stuff poisonous?”

Sai shakes his head muzzily, trying to clear his head. His heartbeat is still pounding away furiously in his chest, refusing to slow down even with a chakra-laced command. A sudden exhaustion weighs down his limbs, making even breathing seem like an impossible task, let alone thinking. “No,” he says slowly, uncurling his white-knuckled fingers and letting the brush drop onto the ground. The handle is painted with a single white stripe.

“No,” he says again, relief flooding his chest. “Not this one.”

“That’s good to hear.” She folds herself into a neat crouch on the ground; Sai tries not to notice how she’s keeping her movements steady and in plain view. “Thanks for busting this one up, Kiki. You wanna go back home now?”

The snake tilts its head for a moment, considering the rest of the backyard. “How much chakra are you willing to spare?”

“Oh, I’ve got maybe an hour’s worth or so in me. I think Tenzou’s got a whole nest of mice and shit up in the basement, you can go look for ‘em if he’s alright with it.”

“More than welcome,” Captain Yamato says, smiling at the snake. The corners don’t quite reach the strained lines around his eyes. “You know I always enjoy your company, Kiki.”

“Good,” the snake says and immediately begins slithering towards the door, muscles rippling underneath her golden scales. The stairs are not much of an inconvenience for a snake nearly twenty feet long and about six feet in diameter.

“Glutton,” the woman says fondly, watching the last bit of Kiki’s tail disappear behind the door, before turning back to Sai.

She moves with deliberation, raising her hands up in front of her face in a clear attempt at diplomacy. “I’m gonna need you to drop your other weapon too.”

Sai looks down in surprise. His other hand is still curled up around the handle of a kunai in a back-handed grip, angled to defend.

“Anko means you no harm,” Captain Yamato adds, with a hint of command.

He hesitates for a fraction before sliding the blade back in its ankle sheath.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” she says gravely. “I’m going to ask you a few questions, right from this spot, okay? I won’t move any closer unless you want me to.”

Sai looks at her blankly, before realizing that she is expecting a response. He forces himself to nod his head jerkily.

“When’s the last time you ever got checked out by the hospital?” She shakes her head slightly when Sai lifts his right arm in the air, bone twinging under the black brace.

“Not physical stuff. I mean, when’s the last time you met with Psychological Services?” Her hand moves to brush the temple of her head. “Had an eval, or even see a counselor.”

Sai watches the way she watches him, like he is a broken, frightened animal. “I have not.”

“Ever?” she asks gently, and he can see Captain Yamato flinch in his peripheral vision.

“I don’t understand,” he says tiredly. “How are these questions relevant to the current situation?” To be fair, Sai himself doesn’t even understand what the current situation is. His head is aching, his fingertips are numb, and all he wants to do is go home, activate all of his locking seals, and sleep with his old ninjato under his pillow.

(He wants to go back to the certainty of serving in ROOT, to shed the snakeskin of emotions wrapped suffocatingly around his chest, back to the familiarity of Danzou-sama’s chakra brushing against his, pressing him down to the cold stone floor.)

“Looks like to me you’re exhibiting some signs of acute combat stress. I know they’ve been giving out pamphlets by the boatload since they shipped us back from the front, and scheduling regular appointments for returning ninja. It can happen to anyone.” Anko crosses her arms over her chest, sleeves riding up to reveal hints of serpentine tattoos on both arms, black scales crisscrossing over tanned skin.

A flicker of glossy blue paper comes to mind along with the face of his weary jounin Commander (the fourth, after the first three had been torn to shreds, gutted open, and the last one simply lost, gone one morning after a quiet night), as she took down names and pressed her hand on the cold pale faces of the dead. _Time to go home_ , she said softly, as he sealed the corpses into ceremonial scrolls to bring back to Konoha to be honored and cremated.

“That’s impossible,” Sai says, pressing down hard on his eyes with the heel of his hands, great big splotchy purple shadows arcing across his vision. The jounin Commander’s dark, heart-shaped face dissolves into Captain Yamato’s thick knitted brow, framing lined brown eyes.

“We-- I was specifically trained to prevent this sort of occurrence. We were supposed to be better, stronger, faster. The perfect unbreakable tools. Not. Not whatever this is,” Sai breathes out, and his heartbeat speeds wildly out of his control, all attempts at controlling his biomechanisms unravelling like frayed rope.

Sai looks down at his hands, the ridges of his callouses marked with ink stains and weathered scars. “Danzou-sama was wrong about Naruto-kun and he was not fit to be the Hokage. I understand that. But what we did, what ROOT did, what he _made_ of us. If it doesn’t work, then what was the point of it all?” He swallows. What did his brother die for, in the end? What was the point of all their deaths, deep inside the subterranean depths of ROOT HQ, if it didn’t fucking _work_?

“I’ve been trying to find the answer to that my whole life,” Captain Yamato says, lifting his hand just in time to catch a falling leaf.

He twirls it by the stem for a minute, the edges rippling in the air from the momentum.

“Tenzou,” Anko says in a low voice. “You know what they said about taxing the seals.”

The leaf flares with a blue surge of chakra, then begins to slowly crumple in on itself, green morphing into a sickly yellow hue, then shrinking into a brown shadow of its former shape. “Every time, I can’t help but think, ‘maybe it’ll work this time’.” The leaf holds its shriveled form for a moment longer before crumbling into dust, and the Captain is left holding nothing but air.

Anko snarls, revealing sharp, inhuman fangs curved over the edge of her lip. An amber drop lingers at the tip of a point before falling onto the grass, marked by a faint hiss of corrosive smoke.

“So you see now,” Captain Yamato says slowly, letting his hand fall back onto his lap. “We three are the survivors of the dreams of old men, marked by choices not of our own making.” He pauses, tilts his head at Anko, then nods at some unspoken signal.

She strides over at once towards him, cuffing him roughly around the head. She mouths something Sai can’t quite catch, then lifts the front of the Captain’s shirt to check the main seal.

“It’s fine for now, but if you don’t quit poking at it, you’ll have Haruno to deal with.”

Captain Yamato huffs a little ruefully. “Too true.”

Anko settles herself behind the wheelchair, leaning her elbows on the handlebars. The sunlight illuminates their combined silhouette, the line of her back a protective curve around the Captain’s shoulders.

Sai looks away, unable to continue watching, a sick feeling rising up in his stomach.

“Perhaps instead of asking what _you_ do, I should instead ask: what do _I_ do now?”

This time it’s Anko who answers. “You just go on,” she says simply. “However you can, just keep going. And don’t let the old bastards win.”

 

* * *

 

The pinwheel is silver, for Shin’s hair, painted with blue stripes. The blue is for Anko, who said that monochrome pinwheels lacked flair, and for Captain Yamato, who agreed and also said that Anko was too meddlesome and overdramatic.

Sai pushes the stick firmly into the ground, off to the side so it won’t obscure any of the names on the memorial stone. He remains kneeling for a little while longer, watching the shadows lengthen and grow.

“It was a nice ceremony,” the Hokage remarks, his signature flickering into existence like the flash of a silver dagger in the dark. “Beautiful morning, plenty of sunshine. Monk who blessed it was very nice, had a good voice for reciting sutras. I was a little sorry to see that you didn’t make it.”

Sai starts, then relaxes his grip on his ink brush. “Hokage-sama,” he murmurs, making motions to get up before the Hokage stops him with a wave of his hand.

“No need,” the Hokage says easily, settling down cross-legged on the grass next to Sai. He’s clad in faded jounin blues and a tattered flak-vest; the only sign of his office is marked by the hat perched jauntily on his head, bits of silvery hair sticking out underneath in all directions.

“I didn’t see how my presence was required,” Sai says, laying his hands down flat on his knees as he sits in seiza. After a moment’s pause he adds, a little stiffly, “I also did not feel comfortable with the crowd.”

The brim of the red and white Hokage hat bobs as the Hokage tilts his head, then nods. “Things have been progressing with with your therapist?”

Sai’s mouth quirks as he considers the question. “I don’t know if this is progress, but. Things are going,” he says slowly, a little haltingly.

“That’s alright too,” the Hokage says. He reaches out with a hand, fingertips flickering blue for a heartbeat’s span, before conjured wind comes to life and spins the pinwheel around. Sai evaluates the effect of blue stripes in motion and comes to the conclusion that Anko is right about pinwheels and Captain Yamato is right about Anko.

“Thank you,” Sai says. He does not mean the wind chakra.

“I only played a very small part in it.” The Hokage shrugs, scratching the back of his neck and nearly dislodging the ceremonial hat off his head. “You, Tenzou and Anko did the bulk of the work. Coming up with a proposal, presenting it to the Council, researching the files and compiling all of the names and cross-referencing with subject numbers. This new memorial stone wouldn’t exist without your hard work.”

Sai reaches out and presses his hand against Shin’s engraved name on the memorial, the freshly marked stone still warm and thrumming with chakra from the master stonemason’s work. His name is surrounded by the names of their dead yearmates in ROOT, as many as Sai could recover from a scattered handful of files and his own memories. Branching further outward are other fallen ROOT trainees and Orochimaru’s former test subjects, mostly children, but also men and women and half-grown teenagers, each remembered with a personal name, even if all that remained of their life was a single string of numbers and a red mark of FAILURE.

Names, Sai has come to learn, are important, like moving forward, and beating old bastards at life.

“Thank you for not being an old bastard,” Sai says finally. “For listening to us, and letting us do this. Thank you for remembering them as well.”

For a moment, the Hokage is silent, a white knuckled fist pressed against the forehead protector slanted over his right eye. “You’re welcome, Sai,” he says, his voice ragged and a little hoarse. He coughs a little, then clears his throat.

“Ah, It’s a beautiful day, Shin, isn’t it?” the Hokage says almost idly, as he tilts his head up to look at the cloudless sky. “I hope Obito’s not bothering you too much.”

Sai bows his head and lets the tears flow.


End file.
